This collection of essays by scholars from the Andes, Europe and the United States was originally published in the French journal Annales as a special double issue entitled The Historical Anthropology of Andean Societies. It combines the perspectives of archaeology, anthropology and history to present a complex view of Andean societies over various millenia. The unique features of the Andean landscape, the impact of the Inka state on different regions and ethnic groups, the transformations wrought through the colonial presence and the creation of nineteenth-century republics are all analysed,...

John V. Murra's Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, originally given in 1969, are the only major study of the Andean "avenue towards civilization." Collected and published for the first time here, they offer a powerful and insistent perspective on the Andean region as one of the few places in which a so-called "pristine civilization" developed. Murra sheds light not only on the way civilization was achieved here--which followed a fundamentally different process than that of Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica--he uses that study to shed new light on the general problems of achieving civilization in any...